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Native Instruments Giant Piano (Video Review)

Native Instruments has introduced The Giant – a new piano virtual instrument:

Sampled in amazing detail, THE GIANT is a unique instrument with an extremely strong low end, crystalline highs, rich overtones, plenty of punch, and a colossal sonic spectrum – from the devastating to the sublime.

This powerful sound is easily enhanced and modified to fit your productions. 40 meticulously-tweaked presets provide production-ready starting points, and detailed control features let you precisely shape the sound in every dimension, making the instrument supremely versatile, whatever the project.

THE GIANT is two instruments in one. A dark, cinematic alter ego, effectively a separate instrument alongside the main piano, offers an irresistible playground for sound design and dramatic effects. Create your own mix of unconventional, individually-sampled sound sources – overtones, resonances, plucked strings, release sounds and special techniques such as piano hits, kicks, sweeps or scratches – all directly and instantly playable from the interface, delivering professional results with a fast workflow.

These avant-garde sounds are also enhanced with detailed control options and a dedicated FX convolution engine with over 100 special piano effect impulse responses.

The original instrument is the Klavins Piano Model 370i. The ‘i’ stands for integrated – this huge upright piano is built into the wall of a room, effectively securing the soundboard. Over three meters high and weighing over two tons, the Klavins Piano Model 370i provides a soundboard that’s roughly twice the size of a typical 9′ concert grand piano soundboard.

In this video, Russ Hughes from Pro Tools Expert takes a look at the new Native Instruments Giant Piano. Here’s his video review:

Because we sure need something. Maybe a more responsive market place. Maybe more so-called bricks and mortar places for musicians to play in real life in front of real audiences. Maybe more musicians who play from their own feelings rather than from this-or-that genre. Maybe more battery-powered devices so musicians can take their music to real life places in front of real audiences.

There, I’ve named some things I think we might need. What do YOU think we need?

I do really think that we actually have such an arsenal of synths that we don’t need anything more. With such an amount of sound generators we have at our disposal today we are able to create every sound we want, every sound that has ever been made and every sound that will be created in the feature. The very obvious reason is that the base of every sound is a waveform, no matter of what “new” synth you use, it just produces a waveform. And there won’t be any synthesizer which is able to create a waveform that can’t be done with something else, already existing, may it be software or hardware. This fact covers all of your aspects, besides of battery powered synths. But to be dependent of a socket outlet has never distract musicians to perform in front a an audience. However, I didn’t talk about those aspects, I was talking about sound.

So I still think that we don’t need any new synthesizers. But nonetheless I know that the market is evolving, producing new synths every week and claiming that YOU NEED this because of its uniqueness. This is the point where the marketing offices kicks in, and they really have a hard job to do. Because they know as well as we do that all that is actually nonsense. And it works because this business is a very emotionally driven business where, more often than not, hard facts don’t count.

I don’t really disagree with you, but I think you’re overlooking one part of the reality of music history. Typically new instruments don’t get invented to create entirely new sounds, but rather to give easier access, easier performance access, to old sounds. So, for instance, the clarinet existed already, but people invented the saxophone to create sounds LIKE the clarinet but without the complicated and demanding fingering of the clarinet. I’d guess that dynamic will continue. Right now various synths can make any sound a musician or sound designer can imagine. But still NEW synths will get designed and built because new interfaces will give people access to those capabilities in easier, more intuitive ways.

Interesting discussion – but if you buy the ‘we don’t need any new synths’ argument, why would you think we need any at all? When synths were new, people questioned why they were needed, because you already had instruments that could make all the sounds of the orchestra.

As much as we might like to think the opposite, technology drives change in music. Give musicians new tools and they’ll come up with new music.

Well, okay, its a piano. It sounds pretty rich, but there’s nothing there you cannot do with the majority of the others. I can stack two pianos, drop in a little convo reverb and get most of those sounds. I think the comment about our having virtually EVERYTHING available now throws it back on us to DO something with it, rather than keep gnawing on the feature wars.